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Monday, February 23, 2015

Sprout turned one last week (I have no idea where the last year has gone - somewhere between work and sleep deprivation, probably). And in honor of her birthday, I finished up a sweater for the son of a dear friend of mine who had turned one in January.

Sprout helped me with the FO shots (and confirmed that I had worked the right size).

This sweater is all about big squishy cables, which look fantastic in Rios. I don't remember using a cable needle on this one (see earlier comment on sleep deprivation) so I'm pretty sure even the largest crosses are doable without a cable needle.

And did you see that zipper in the first picture? I won't make you scroll back up - here it is again:

I'm enormously proud of it. I should be - I sewed in a zipper about 4 times on this project. Ok, maybe 2 and a half. But that's still 1 and a half times more than you really want to do.

Note to self - check to see if the zipper is a separating zipper before sewing it all the way in. That put me back a couple of hours (you'll notice I said "a" zipper rather than "the" zipper above).

I hadn't planned to use a zipper in the first place but I ran out of yarn about halfway down the second sleeve and, since I had bought the yarn over a year ago, I doubted I'd be able to find any that matched. So I had to borrow some from somewhere. Half the button band got me to the cuff and then stealing a few rows from the other cuff let me get two full sleeves.

Second note to self - yarn does not magically regenerate.

When I see that I'm running out of yarn, I tend to set the project aside and hope that if I don't look at it directly, more yarn will somehow appear. My knitting life would be so much easier if I just frogged the first sleeve cuff right away and got the piece out of my WIP pile. Somehow stealing yarn from the button band doesn't seem quite as traumatizing as ripping back the sleeves so this zipper trick may be my saving grace. Especially now that I have lots of practice at sewing in zippers.

Third note to self - try to buy enough yarn next time. Maybe it's time to check out the stashbot app.